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Yusef Lateef's Secret Garden
by Chris M. Slawecki
This interview was originally published in February 2000. Yusef Lateef will tell you--politely, firmly, insistently, frequently--that he does not play jazz. He was born Bill Evans in Chattanooga (TN), but grew up in Detroit a tenor saxophone student who in the 1940s worked and studied alongside the likes of Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie and Hot Lips Page. In the 1950s, he studied composition and flute at Wayne State University; shortly thereafter he assumed the name Yusef ...
read moreYusef Lateef: Celebrating 75 Years of Music at Roulette in Brooklyn
by Scott Krane
Rarely in the history of contemporary American music has one artist iconized as many aspects of organized sound as Yusef Lateef who appeared in Brooklyn, New York on Saturday night, April 6, at the new Brooklyn version of the Manhattan performance space, Roulette, near the new Barclay's Arena. In a two-hour performance billed, “Yusef Lateef: Celebrating 75 years of music," the 92-year-old remnant of modern jazz displayed the breadth of his musical imagination in a four-part concert.The Grammy Award-winning ...
read moreYusef Lateef: Roots Run Deep
by John Sharpe
Roots Run Deep forms a further installment in the ongoing strand of investigation into the marriage of words and music, which has found a home on the Paris-based Rogue Art label, that also includes Maison Hantee (2009). It's unusual in that though issued under the name of veteran multi instrumentalist Yusef Lateef, the work was actually conceived by filmmaker Nicolas Humbert and engineer Marc Parisotto. The two Frenchmen are credited with composition; having assembled the 34-minute program by matching the ...
read moreYusef Lateef: Eastern Sounds Turns 50
by Alan Bryson
Think back fifty years to the days portrayed on the TV series Mad Men. In 1961, John Kennedy and Billboard's Easy Listening Chart were inaugurated, a freedom riders bus was fire-bombed in Alabama, Rock Hudson was on the big screen, and Doris Day was selling albums. As teenagers and their swinging parents were twisting their brains out to Chubby Checker or the “authentic music by the King Curtis Combo," East German communists began construction of the Berlin ...
read moreYusef Lateef: Ten Years Hence
by Bert Bailey
This 2008 release of a live 1975 performance at San Francisco's Keystone Korner may appeal to Lateef completists, but those still new to him or curious about his fame might consider starting elsewhere.The first of Ten Years Hence's five long numbers is Bob Cunningham's three-part “Samba De Amor," which begins with the bassist bowing and plucking alongside the sound of cowbells, horns, whoops and other vocalizations, and Lateef on transverse flute. Fully five minutes on, a light but ...
read moreYusef Lateef: Eastern Sounds
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Eastern Sounds, newly remastered by Rudy van Gelder (the storied engineer who recorded the original September 1961 session), marks an early stage in Yusef Lateef's development. In particular, the record highlights two characteristics that would come to define his artistic identity: a spiritual streak and a fascination with non-Western music. Like John Coltrane (whose path resembles Lateef's in these respects) on “My Favorite Things," Lateef here frequently incorporates “Eastern sounds" in the form of modal vamps.This musical cross-pollination ...
read moreYusef Lateef: Roots & Routes
by Tom Greenland
Yusef Lateef is one of the first practitioners of “our music" to embrace “the other", those peoples and cultures far removed geographically and often ideologically from the sounds and sensibilities of North America. A renaissance man for the new millennium, Lateef is a philosopher, organologist, composer/arranger/performer, educator, author and acoustic Argonaut. He'll be in town in January for “Detroit: Motor City Jazz" at Jazz at Lincoln Center, a concert series featuring fellow Detroit alumni Charles McPherson, Ron Carter, Marcus Belgrave ...
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